Is Hacking of Panama Documents Legal or Illegal?
Blog No. 1 : Is Hacking of Panama documents legal or illegal ?
Recently there was a big news about panama confidential document leakage. Panamanian law firm was holding secret documents for almost 40 years, starting from year 1977 to till end of 2015 with huge volume of 2.6 terabytes of darkest data.
It had leaked confidential reports about foreign customer holdings including presidents, prime ministers, politicians,filmstars, tycoons and various heads of government of more than forty other countries, including Brazil, China, France, India, Malaysia, Mexico..etc. It also includes passports, xls sheet, emails and corporate record and secret bank accounts.
Total of 11.5 million confidential documents were exposed. Mossack Fonseca corporate service provider of Panamanian company has listed detail information about 2,14,000 offshore companies.Documents clearly explains about the wealthy people hiding their public money from public scrutiny.
Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ)s a German newspaper leaked this information over one year ago. Then it was made available to 100 media organizations including Indian Express. These media organisations scanned through the score of documents, investigated the linkages, connected the linkages and shared the information with the world on April 4, 2016.
Indian Govt has setup multiple agency team to investigate about 500 Indians named by International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. PM ordered probe and Finance Minister has confirmed that he will take strict action against the default unlawful accounts.
Questions ?
How did these documents leaked? Is it really hacking or some whistle blower within the company would have exposed the data. How journalist got the information? Is hacking considered to be criminal in cyber space? Can we convict intelligent cyber crime hacker ? Can we take legal actions against Law firms for not protecting the clients’ secret data? Is it really hacking or some whistleblower would have exposed the data. How security of this firm can be so dismal ? This is unbelievable.
Critical Analysis